Kenneth J W Taylor, MD, PhD, FACP, was born in 1939 in the United Kingdom. He graduated B.Sc in Physiology at the London University in 1961 and M.B.B.S., Guy's Hospital, London University, in 1964. After graduation, he was house surgeon at the Royal Surrey Hosital, Guilford, and later on senior house surgeon in Neurosurgery at the Guy's Maudsley Hospital in London. In 1972, he received his Ph. D., and in 1975, the M.D. degree from the London University.In 1975, after finishing a Fellowship in Ultrasound and Nuclear Medicine at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London (1973-75), he moved to the Yale University School of Medicine in the United States to pursue further research and applications in diagnostic ultrasonography. He was appointed as a tenured professor of radiology at Yale in 1979. During his fellowship, Taylor collaborated with David Carpenter, an engineer from George Kossoff's laboratory in Australia developing gray scale apparatus and exploring the use of gray scale ultrasound in patients with cancer. With CR Hill and VR McCready the group published their experience with gray scale imaging in 1973 and demonstrated their version of the compound gray-scale contact scanner. His clinical work on the diagnosis of hepatobiliary disease using gray scale ultrasonography formed the basis for his MD thesis in 1975.
After his appointment in 1975, Taylor founded the Yale-New Haven Hospital School of Diagnostic Ultrasound. The program was initiated by the hospital in response to an emerging need to train technologists to assist and support physicians in the new modality. Initially the program trained one to two students per year in general ultrasound. Over the last 25 years the program has grown to accept 10 students per year and has graduated over 150 students meeting the demands of the hospital and the community with highly trained, board eligible sonographers.
Taylor was amongst the first to describe doppler flow in the ovarian and uterine arteries in 1985. His many research interests included evaluation of the role of ultrasound in ovarian cancer screening and detection of vascularity in tumors by Doppler ultrasound. His visionary interests in promoting the use of ultrasound in the diagnosis of abdominal and pelvic disease also stimulated postgraduate medical specialists, and his students were now in practice in the United States, Europe, South America, Japan, and the Caribbean. Taylor was a fellow of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) since 1975 and a fellow of the American College of Physicians since 1981. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine from January 1992 to February 2003. He was the vice chair of the International Relations Committee (1993-1996) and then the chair of the International Relations Committee. In addition, he served on the Bioeffects Committee from 1993 to 1997. Teaching was his major love, both during the day-to-day practice of ultrasound and in lectures and conferences. He lectured worldwide and engendered great enthusiasm for the use of ultrasound.
Taylor had published more than 200 scientific papers. He was the author of numerous books on diagnostic ultrasound, including the ground-breaking "Atlas of Gray Scale Ultrasonography" in 1978. His books were widely published in the United States, South America, Europe, and Asia. His more recent interest was on doppler ultrasound diagnosis and he had gained important grant support from the American Cancer Society and National Institutes of Health for his work on detection of tumor vascularity by Doppler ultrasound. He chaired the editorial committee of the Clinics in Diagnostic Ultrasound series from 1978 to 1994. He was also at the forefront of research in the clinical uses of Doppler ultrasound, collaborating with reknowned physicists Peter Wells and Peter Burns and in publication of the successful textbook Clinical Application of Doppler Ultrasound in 1995.
He passed away in February 2003 in New Haven, Connecticut.